The Golden Chair

by A J Fontenot

  “What happened?” Erin asked.

  “What happened to most of Africa,” Kwami said, leaning back in his chair. “Europeans,” nodding his beer-hand toward Ben.

  Ben seemed to want to contest that, but Kwami kept talking.

  “In the late eighteen-hundreds,” Kwami said, “the British and Ashanti had an agreement. The Ashanti allowed the British to work and trade inside their kingdom. In return, the British stayed out of Ashanti affairs. And that went well until the British decided they wanted more. They didn’t want to exist with the Ashanti; they wanted to rule over them.

  “The Ashanti had great wealth,” he said, “But many empires had wealth. The Ashanti, however, had something more, something sacred the others didn’t. And it was what eventually caused a war between the British and the Ashanti…”

  Kwami sat back and sipped his beer. He looked off into the jungle, at nothing in particular, sitting silently.

  Erin looked at Ben and then back at Kwami.

  “Well,” Marisol said, “what was it?”

  Kwami didn’t acknowledge her question for a moment. Still staring off. And then, “what was…what?” he said, looking back at the group.

  “What was the sacred Ashanti thing?” Marisol said.

  “The seat of the gods, of course,” Kwami said.

  “The what?” Gavin said.

  “It is said,” Kwami said, “that the seat — the golden chair — never touched the ground. That it had the ability to float”—he gestured again, spilling more beer again—“and that it appeared and disappeared whenever the great Ashanti leader needed it.”

  “Come on…,” Gavin said.

  “Come on, what?”

  “That stuff,” Gavin said. “It’s not real…I mean, you don’t believe that, do you?”

  “I warned you,” Paul said, from his seat outside the circle.

  “It is you,” he pointed to Gavin, “who do not believe. How do you know it is not true? How do you know if anything, for that matter, is true or not?”

  “Yeah,” Marisol chirped, “how do you know, Gavin?”

  Gavin opened his mouth and then shut it again.

  “Okay,” Ben said. “So there’s this sacred object, a chair or whatever, and it belongs to the Ashanti tribe, right? What does a magical chair have to do with this lost treasure you were talking about?”

  “One day,” Kwami said, “some fool, a representative of the Queen of England, demanded, that his own queen be allowed to sit on the holy Ashanti chair. To the Ashanti, this was, understandably, a great insult. Soon, tens of thousands of Ashanti warriors had gathered, and they drove the British out of their land. Ending their agreement. And, for the British, it was a massacre.”

  “Of course,” Kwami continued, “a few years later, the British came back and conquered the Ashanti and all of their empire. But…they never found the golden chair.”

  “So what happened to it?” Marisol asked.

  “There were many rumors,” Kwami said. “Some said it went back to heaven, where it came from. Others said that the British found it but hid it. Some later said the Nazis found it when they went all over the world looking for artifacts. But, these are all rumors. The chair was not a treasure to be found and owned. It was holy. The Ashanti protected it.”

  “I’m confused,” Gavin said. “So the Ashanti had the golden chair thing the whole time?”

  “May-be,” he said slowly. “The Ashanti had a holy room, where the chair appeared. The British knew about this room. But they did not know where it was. And they searched more or less until the mid-teens, when they had to stop because of the First World War. And not too long after that war came the second. The Nazis too, they searched for it. Part of what they called their cultural collection initiative. Where they went around collecting sacred objects from many different cultures.”

  “Okay, so…,” Marisol said.

  “Do you know why the Akosombo Dam was created?” Kwami asked.

  “Uh, no,” Marisol said.

  “About fifty years ago,” Ben said, “the dam was built, and once the Volta basin was flooded, it created Lake Volta. The same ‘Lake Volta’ very close to where we are now.”

  Kwami looked at Ben, apparently impressed, “that’s right,” he said, “the largest manmade lake in the world. Right here in Ghana. And, do you know why it was created?”

  “I imagine, the same reason all dams are created,” Ben said. “To create electricity.”

  “That was the official reason. But not the real one,” Kwami said. “The dam was created in the early 1960s by Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first Ghanaian president. Ghana had just won its independence from the British. The Cold War was just beginning to heat up — especially in non-western places like Latin America and Africa — and Nkrumah believed—

  “Wait,” Marisol said. “How do you know all this…random stuff?”

  “Don’t you know about your country?” he said.

  “I…,” she started and looked away.

  “As I was saying, many Ghanaians believe that the holy site for the golden chair was where the city of Akosombo was. That,” he said, “is why they picked that location for the dam.”

  “So you’re saying this it was just, what…a conspiracy?” Ben said.

  “I’m saying,” Kwami said, “that the timing was right. In the mid-sixties, Ghana was still a new country. And world powers like Russia and the United States were increasingly vying for control of the free world. And so the United States and Britain helped finance the dam that would create Lake Volta. Their interest was diplomatic and trade. Our interest was—”

  “The golden chair,” Marisol said.

  “Right,” Kwami smiled.

  “Okay,” Ben said, “even if this is all true…wouldn’t flooding the whole area have destroyed the holy room and the chair and whatever else?”

  Kwami looked at him for a moment before answering. “You,” he pointed to him, “come from a country of wealth. You do not understand what’s like.”

  “Okay, but still—” Ben said.

  “Sometimes,” Kwami continued, “it’s better some things go undiscovered.”

  “But,” Marisol said, “you said the golden chair was discovered, right?”

  “Yes,” Kwami said, going quiet again. “Yes, it seems that…it might have been.”

  The rest of the group became silent.

  Erin took another sip of her beer and realized that the bottle was empty. She’d been listening to Kwami’s story; she hadn’t even noticed she’d finished it. And for a moment, she’d forgotten where she was. She’d forgotten that she was halfway around the world with people she’d just met, and camping in the middle of nowhere.

  And yet, despite all that, she didn’t feel alone or isolated. She listened, and laughed, and drank, feeling already like she belonged with these people. At least, for tonight she did.

  Or, then again, maybe that was just the jetlag talking.

  Erin lay in bed. Awake. Listening to the sounds out in the jungle. In her mind, she kept jumping from thought to thought. The only thing her brain wasn’t doing now was sleeping.

  She kept turning over what Kwami said. About the rumors of some mythical chair being found…could such a thing even be true, she wondered.

  Then, soon, other thoughts flooded her mind. Like about Carl and why he changed his mind…and what his relationship to Jonah Lennox was…and what did mom know about Lennox…and why did she trust him…and why he would have betrayed her…

  Maybe McGillis was right. Maybe the only connection between her mother and all of this was the connection in her imagination. Involuntarily, her mind flashed back to the time in Trinidad. Hunting down a lead, chasing it into a dead end. A dead end…she thought. She’d almost died the last time she tried to chase down the truth about her mother…

  She turned her head to the side, looking around their trailer. Her eyes had long adjusted to the light. The shadows, she thought, made really weird shapes on the ceiling. Ma
risol, in the other bed, was still. Sleeping. Erin wished she was sleeping.

  Outside she could hear a rhythmic, mechanical chirping. It was sometime before she realized these were the sounds the bats were making as they hunted their prey. She wondered, vaguely, as she began to drift to sleep, what it would feel like if some giant bat was methodically watching her…chasing her…hunting her…beep…beep…maybe that’s what happened to her mother…beep…maybe a bat got her…

  21

  Doubletap

  Erin woke up with a headache. Light poured in from the shades she didn’t draw last night. She could see feel it, even before she opened her eyes. She turned her head to the side and looked at Marisol’s bed. It was empty.

  Outside, birds were making loud, obnoxious noises.

  Or…were those voices?

  She rolled out of her bed, pulled her hair back, and slipped her boots on. She opened the door and looked out. If it were possible, the sunlight outside was even louder. Her head throbbed.

  She raised her arm and covered her eyes. As she did, she saw Ben lobbing one of last night’s bottles into the cloud of dust. It was a truck, speeding out of camp. There was a lot of swearing.

  “Ben,” she heard Paul say. “Now is not the time.”

  Ben didn’t respond.

  As Erin looked around, she noticed everyone else was standing by, looking at where the truck was. She walked over to Marisol. “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “Keeler,” Marisol said, not taking her eyes off of the cloud of dust.

  “Who is Keeler?” Erin asked, still squinting, everywhere was bright.

  Marisol didn’t answer at first.

  Erin looked at her and saw her slide something under her shirt into the small of her back. It looked a bit like an external hard drive.

  “Trouble.”

  “What do you mean? What did he want?”

  “He works for Lennox.”

  “Lennox? What was he doing here?” Erin said.

  “Yeah,” Marisol said, looking at Erin for the first time. “Delivers data every few days. Reports, stuff like that. The lab where they process isn’t far from here.”

  “Okay…What does th—”

  “Gavin started running some tests recently,” Marisol said. “Stuff wasn’t lining up. So we started collecting some of our own data. Turns out, they’ve been fabricating what they send to us.”

  “Why?”

  Marisol was quiet, as if she didn’t hear the question. “He drives in our camp,” she said, “slings an automatic rifle over his shoulder, finger on the trigger, and walks around like he owns the place. It’s a message,” Marisol looking at Erin again. “A power play. He’s saying he doesn’t care what we know, and if we say anything…”

  Marisol turned to walk back to the trailer. Erin walked back with her. As they stepped inside, Erin was beginning to wake up, and her mind was filling up new questions.

  Marisol sat down on the bed, reached under the back of her shirt and pulled out the hard drive Erin had seen earlier. Except, it wasn’t a hard drive. She tossed it on the bed next to her. It was a tiny gun.

  “Is that a…gun?” Erin said.

  Marisol picked it up again, and it fit inside the palm of her hand. It made a clicking sound as she flicked it open. She looked into the small barrels, closed it again, and dropped it on the bed beside her. All like she’d done it a thousand times.

  “It’s called a Doubletap,” she said.

  She looked tired, Erin noticed.

  “No magazine, no revolver. Just two bullets, one in each barrel. It’s small enough to fit into the palm of my hand, or easily hide under clothes. Wanna hold it?” she said looking up at Erin.

  “Oh,” Erin said, not reaching for it. “No…I’m not really much of a gun person.”

  Marisol shrugged.

  “Do you think you really need something like that?” Erin said.

  Marisol was quiet.

  “I grew up in Catania, in Sicily,” she said. “A place where…” she glanced at the gun on the bed, “where there’s been a lot of crime for a long time. And unless you’re at the top, or well-connected to the top — of which we were neither — then it’s not a good place.”

  She was quiet before continuing. “So as soon as I could, I left. Sixteen. And, it turns out, when you learn to survive in a place like that,” she nodded to the gun on the bed as she said it, “the rest of the world isn’t so hard.”

  “I didn’t know you were Italian,” Erin said.

  “Another thing I’ve learned,” she half-smiled. “No matter what people say about Americans, most people still like them. Or at least, most people want to be one. So, that’s what I did. I became what others wanted, and I made friends with the people who…,” she didn’t finish the rest of her sentence.

  Erin wanted to say something else.

  “But then,” Marisol said, “I met Paul.” Her face brightened a little as she said it. “It’s strange,” she said, looking out the window. “It’s almost like, with Paul, you don’t have to worry about some things, ya know…”

  Erin nodded.

  But the truth was, she wasn’t so sure she did know what she meant. It seemed like everyone else knew Paul better than she did. That was just one more question she added to her already mounting pile. The biggest of which was why…

  SERA did humanitarian aid work. Their whole mission was to help developing governments plan strategically for environmental issues. She could understand them being kept in the dark on some things. For confidentiality, perhaps. But giving them wrong information…that was something else.

  Why was Lennox changing the data…and why was Paul going along with it…or…was he? Maybe he didn’t know, she thought.

  “Anyway,” Marisol said, her tone more like herself again. “I’m hungry.”

  She picked up the little gun, put it in the small of her back, pulling her shirt at the edges, and moved toward the door to leave.

  Before she left, Erin called to her. “Marisol?” she said.

  “Yeah,” she paused at the door.

  “Does anyone else know you carry that?”

  “No,” her eyes darted down as she said it. “I’m…not trying to keep secrets,” Marisol said. “I just find it easier this way.”

  She didn’t have to explain anymore. In a strange way, Erin understood what she meant.

  Marisol walked outside to get breakfast.

  Erin stayed inside, sitting on her bed, thinking. She pulled out her laptop to see if she could get on SERA’s wifi.

  22

  Nkonya Market

  Mofi sat in the back of another truck; his head rocked to the side as the truck went over a bump.

  He’d spent most of the last few days in the rural Jasikan district, walking and hitching rides. There were no tro-tros out here — the over-crowded buses that filled the metropolis of Accra, that he’d come to rely on. And so travel in the bush was harder, slower.

  Sitting under the morning sun, already high and hot, Mofi thought again about Tano. About where he was. About what might have happened to him. Wondering if he made it away before the big man found him — the same big man who’d shot at Mofi as he ran.

  The driver of the truck reached a hand out of his window and banged his palm on the side of the door. “Nkonya,” he called, as the truck slowed. Mofi sat up and looked out. He saw a small market he’d last seen many years before. He hopped over the side as the truck picked up speed again and drove off.

  Nkonya was Mofi’s lead.

  His only lead.

  When he’d last seen Paul, he was working in this area. Years ago, Tano was working for him, as a guide and translator. Mofi walked past an old shipping container that had been converted into a business front, a large pile of black tires lying next to it. He turned off the main paved road and walked into the market.

  He stopped and talked briefly to shop owners, asking them if they remembered the white man who worked with Tano. Africans have good me
mories. And when a white man shows up in a rural area like this, he stands out. People still remember it years later. And most he talked to did remember Paul. But none of them had seen him in a long time.

  Mofi kept walking.

  And that was when he noticed the other man.

  Ghana has been a peaceful and prosperous country for many years. As a result, a lot of tribes have come to live here. To Westerners, they often look indistinguishable. But to the locals, they were anything but. One of the key distinctions between different tribes who live near each other is their markings. The scars on their face, carved when they were young boys and girls. To some, such a practice sounds barbaric. But it’s not here. It’s a sign of honor and heritage. And it was how tribes could immediately identify their other members. It’s how people knew and trusted one another. And it was one of the ways Mofi knew the man following him now didn’t belong.

  Mofi had never been followed before. And before a few days ago, he’d never been shot at either.

  The man wore a white and red checked shirt. And he knew he was following him, because he’d seen the same white and red checked shirt yesterday. Far from the Nikonya market where he now was. The chances of that were pretty small.

  Mofi looked over his shoulder again, but the man had turned. He couldn’t see his face. Mofi kept moving. Faster now. He risked another look. But…the man had disappeared.

  Mofi stopped walking. He doubled back, taking another way around.

  Through the crowd, he thought he saw the red and white pattern. He stared longer. But…nothing.

  Since arriving, the best lead he’d found — which wasn’t a very good lead — was some white people over at the coast. Mofi was now on the other side of Lake Volta. And he was keenly aware he was moving in a circle since he left a few days ago.

  The more he dwelled on it, the more he developed a bad feeling about the man with the white and red checked shirt.